Day 6: Climb Every Mountain (for Yelena)

Day Six: Climb Every Mountain (for Yelena)

6/12/11:

I liked a lot of things about North House, my abode of the summer. Faulty electricity, a broken microwave, and temperamental cable didn’t even begin to faze me. Nope, I was content with all that North House had to offer:  the bird/house-mascot Franklin, the three-minute and lizard-plentiful walk to work, the view from my room of Clover Ruins.

I was also fairly thrilled by our proximity to the Bill Williams Mountain Trail, whose trailhead was a mere four minute jaunt from North House. Gaining about 2,200 feet in elevation (7,000-9,200 feet) in three miles, the Bill Williams Mountain Trail was the first of many to be conquered by our hearty band of Midwest lowlanders (Yelena, Noah, and myself).

Bill Williams Mountain casts its shadow over both the town of Williams and the Williams Ranger District. A beautiful old thing, Bill Williams is in a sad state of mega-overgrowth. Far too many ponderosa pines have created both an unhealthy forest and the potential for wildly destructive fires. To deal with this, controlled burns are used to thin the area: a prescribed fire allows for a (mostly) manageable burn off of trees and underbrush and would allow for the healthy regeneration of the forest.

The lower slopes of Bill Williams Mountain have been thinned with prescribed burns; however, controlled burns cannot be carried out on the higher and steeper slopes without heavy mechanical thinning treatments or even some helicopter logging. One of the projects we worked on this summer was the Bill Williams Mountain Project: before thinning or a burn can be prescribed, archies, bios, and other specialists must survey the area for archaeological sites, rare animals, and other entities that warrant protection from logging or a controlled burn.

During our (admittedly slow) climb up Bill Williams Mountain, it was obvious that concern about overgrowth was warranted. The white barks of the aspen, the scaly hides of the alligator junipers, the cream soda- scented ponderosa pines, were oppressively abundant.

While at work earlier, I had overheard someone laughingly demand to be allowed to “ping-pong” the area (deploy delayed aerial ignition devices; these little fire balls allow firefighters to select parts of a forest to set on fire) or at least be given a flamethrower and allowed a stroll down the mountain.

Our stroll up the mountain was less a stroll, more a (panting) hike. I wasn’t used to this altitude (Iowa tops out at a pitiful 1,670 feet) but nevertheless, I rounded out my first week as an archy intern by scaling the Bill Williams Mountain Lookout Tower.

There, for the first time, I saw my new little world as it stretched out before me.


Photos: 1. Alligator juniper 2. View from Bill Williams Mountain